Bird, once valued at $2.5B, just filed for bankruptcy

https://www.businessinsider.com/bird-silicon-valley-electric-scooter-startup-files-for-bankruptcy-2023-12

by swinnipeg • 3 years ago

55 72 3 years ago

josefresco• 3 years ago

The global shutdown of major cities in the Covid pandemic hit the scooter startup hard, forcing it to pull all of its scooters from US and European markets

Why did something like COVID effect the use and "contactless" rental of scooters? Was this just collateral damage or did specific changes on laws/regulations cause the pull out?

ImPostingOnHN2• 3 years ago

It is possible that potential customers just had fewer events and open places worth scooting to.

brvsft• 3 years ago

I would also wager that potential repeat customers eventually just bought their own scooter. It's not like they're particularly expensive. If you really enjoyed using one of these, why rent? (I know there are reasons, e.g. I wouldn't want one of those batteries in my house at all. But my point is simply that they can be inexpensive, especially compared to the price of renting.)

recursivecaveat• 3 years ago

I would guess fewer urban commuters due to work-from-home plus retail slowdowns?

turboponyy• 3 years ago

Less people outside -> less scoots

evo• 3 years ago

I suspect if you're wary about fomite spread of disease (later shown to be airborne for COVID but initially assumed), then it's easy to pick up a phobia of grappling the handlebars of a scooter that a stranger has recently used.

Additionally, at least anecdotally here, as the city centers hollowed out of normal business/leisure traffic, a lot of the rental vehicles were visibly breached and used by homeless folks, which often tarnished the literal appearance and reliability of the rental units in addition to damaging the brand.

vladvasiliu2• 3 years ago

I don't know about other locales, but here, in France, people weren't supposed to wander too far away from their homes. Basically, you were only allowed to go to work if you absolutely couldn't work from home – and many people were staying home because their businesses were shut down.

You were not supposed to go visit a friend on the other side of town. "Non-essential" stores were closed, so no reason to go too far away (and if your closest grocery store is far enough to take a scooter, you're probably not living somewhere where they are present).

libraryatnight• 3 years ago

It would be so rad if I could walk to the grocery - I'd get hit by a car for sure though :(

soco• 3 years ago

But how long was that restriction in place?

asdajksah2123• 3 years ago

Citbike in NYC, a bike share program, saw record usage during and post COVID.

If COVID really hurt Bird, what it might be indicating is that Bird's primary user was tourists rather than locals using it as a mode of transportation.

bionsystem2• 3 years ago

It has nothing to do with COVID. The stock was trading at $250 a share in october 2021, and started to drop afterwards, way after vaccines and restrictions in US/EU. It's just some lame excuse like inflation last year, rates now, and whatever is going to hit the news tomorrow.

xeromal• 3 years ago

We weren't allowed to go the beach here in SoCal. If you can't go outside, why would you need a scooter

b1122• 3 years ago

Most places, outside of a few weeks here and there, were still a-ok with you going places. Just not all places.

But, another perspective.... do you want to take a bus, packed with people? Or even an uber, enclosed? Or, a scooter which you can wipe down the handlebars on?

I'd have thought scooters would have soared during the pandemic.

barryrandall• 3 years ago

The user base where I lived mostly consisted of tourists, commuters going from a parking garage to an office building, commuters going from apartments to office buildings, and unsupervised minors doing unsupervised minor things. All but the last group disappeared during the pandemic.

manmal• 3 years ago

Way less office workers and students went to work and school, and this made up a big part of their traffic.

easton• 3 years ago

Didn't they just buy Spin?

blacksmith_tb• 3 years ago

They did[1]. Which makes me wonder if they'll all end up in junkyards, they're packed with batteries, and even RPis[2]...

1: https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/19/bird-acquires-spin-scooter...

2: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/raspberry-pi-4bs-inside-sp...

saalweachter• 3 years ago

Usually it's a bankruptcy auction.

Lotta great stuff at bankruptcy auctions. Sure, you can see it as preying upon others' misfortune, but you can also look at it as helping make their creditors whole.

rchaud3• 3 years ago

Not a single word about revenue or profits, just about how much it was 'valued' at. A lot of VC money is just holding up Potemkin villages of 'innovation'.

lotsofpulp• 3 years ago

Perhaps because most would assume that Bird never earned any profit.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/BRDS/bird-global/n...

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1861449/000186144922...

CalChris• 3 years ago

On an annual basis, they'd be right. Bird had a single quarter with a sliver of a profit followed then by a massive loss.

troupo• 3 years ago

Because that's the true "innovation" that has been coming out of Silicon Valley for the past 10 years or so: losing hundreds of millions or billions of dollars for years without as much as a hint of a plan to become profitable.

FirmwareBurner• 3 years ago

Sounds like a pump and dump with extra steps. Hype up any obvious future failure to pump the stock to crazy valuations, then dump and leave the suckers holding the bags. All enabled by zero interest rates, and VCs were willing to fund some because they knew there's gonna be other suckers out there to enable them to raise the valuations.

FireBeyond• 3 years ago

Just yesterday, comments here about SoFi. "They're still a startup and still in pre-profit growth mode".

Uh, they started lending operations in 2011. How long is that pre-profit growth mode expected to last? Another decade?

candiddevmike• 3 years ago

For Bird, they were sold on a SPAC at $154, so mission accomplished for the VCs. Retail is left holding the bag now.

latchkey2• 3 years ago

Someone should go to jail for that, but it is a highly regulated market, so it is ok.

hnburnsy• 3 years ago

J need to start shorting these IPOs on day one.

ianbutler• 3 years ago

Well spacs were heavily regulated over the last two years, that combined with the inflationary climate should mean things like this are done with for now.

throwoutway• 3 years ago

Never herd of a Potemkin village, had to look it up Thank you for the metaphor

mistrial9• 3 years ago

maybe rental scooters at scale with tracking are not really a great market innovation?

yowlingcat• 3 years ago

I think the key is the "D word" here, which is distribution. The reason why Uber worked is because there was a giant inventory of vehicles owned would-be drivers ready to service a population looking for that service.

But there's no such parallel for rental scooters. In that case, the only capital efficient go to market would be to partner with brick and mortar partners who already have an extensive market presence (and ideally rental infrastructure); of course, that would've made Bird a fundamentally different company.

In the form in which it was conceived and went to market and subsequently folded -- I fully agree with you that no, it makes zero sense to build out all of that infrastructure from scratch and try to capture market share.

syndicatedjelly2• 3 years ago

How do you go bankrupt as a company renting powered scooters, which are possibly the cheapest possible mode of transportation just above a Craigslist bike? Incredible

r00fus• 3 years ago

Theft or other losses, cost of roving charging vans and personnel, etc.

ToucanLoucan3• 3 years ago

Honestly alongside everything else (people hated them and their chargers, they got stolen constantly, etc. etc. etc.) the scooters themselves have collapsed in price, you can pick one up at Best Buy now for like $500. And yeah that's a lot but most of the people who were interested in renting them were a little upmarket anyway, so once they became affordable(ish) why would you rent one when you could own one?

LeifCarrotson• 3 years ago

What I want to know is where I can (legally) pick up used Bird or Lime or Spin or Ofo or Skip scooters. Are they all going in the trash?

RandallBrown• 3 years ago

why would you rent one when you could own one?

Because storing them and dealing with them is a massive pain. I use these scooters way more than I use my bike, and it's not because I don't want to pedal.

When I go out on a scooter I like the flexibility of leaving it at the first place I go. This prevents me from needing to leave my bike parked overnight if I decide to go somewhere else that isn't bike friendly. Not to mention that stealing scooters is really easy and bringing them inside most places isn't really an option.

johannes1234321• 3 years ago

The one you own serves a different purpose. The rental ones take one a bit of the way (from Subway station to office etc.) or one way (to the bar, get drunk, taxi/public transport home)

Doing that with your own one has downsides as you have to carry it along all the time.

Ekaros• 3 years ago

Depends entirely on if enough people actually rent them. And do the rents cover cost and the charging and so on...

Syonyk2• 3 years ago

You get high on your venture capital supply and then remain so disconnected from reality that you don't worry about profits, costs, use, repair, charging, or just about anything else, figuring you can "gig economy worker" your way out of it. Lose money on every transaction, but plan to make it up in volume once you take over the entire market for it. And then realize, rather late, that there are other people in the space, it's not a hard space to get into, and nobody actually really likes you in the first place for your model of "dump semi-loads of scooters first, ask permission never."

dgreensp• 3 years ago

If we’re going to spend half a billion dollars for a company to hire a few hundred people and then fail, I wish it was for a better cause.

hiatus• 3 years ago

Similar article on the same subject also discussed previously, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38706781

diogenescynic• 3 years ago

Good riddance, they've made cities worse and more dangerous. Can't tell you how many times some idiot on a Bird scooter going down a sidewalk has almost hit me or my kids. I've also seen several wipeout when going over track tracks.

bionsystem2• 3 years ago

I'm so glad Paris banned them, it was a mess and very dangerous.

danesparza• 3 years ago

Unfortunately, I don't think they're gone yet. They just filed for bankruptcy protection. Cities are still littered with their scooters - and no clear plan to clean them up.

We should probably publish COO Steve Schnell's address and send him all the scooters littering the cities. You know ... just as a drunken prank.

Reference: https://www.businessinsider.com/bird-coo-drunk-pretend-fired...

marssaxman• 3 years ago

Bird going out of business will not hurt all the other scooter rental companies.

Personally I love electric scooters and use them frequently; they are a great amplifier for walking & transit.

zwieback• 3 years ago

How is the scooter rental market in general? In Portland I pretty much just see Lime now and maybe one out ten is being used, others are parked at the top of steep hills.

floren2• 3 years ago

I used them a bit in Denver this fall. There were plenty of Lyft and Lime scooters around (I used the Lyft ones, because I already had the app installed). People were about 50/50 on riding them in the (pretty damn decent) bike lanes vs being sociopathic assholes brushing past pedestrians on the sidewalk.

linuxftw• 3 years ago

What's worse: being hit on foot by a scooter, or being hit on scooter by a city bus?

wgjordan• 3 years ago

Scooter startup Bird is seeking a $2B valuation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17293571 - June 2018 (269 comments)

Bird has raised $100M for electric scooter sharing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16555913 - March 2018 (146 comments)

osierjtilsja• 3 years ago

Hah. The last time I saw Bird in the news was when they were throwing a tantrum and leaving SF because "strangling government regulations" were ruining their business. Someone in SF city government pointed out that all their competitors were making record profits and said Bird was run by spoiled rich kids with very bad business sense. Goodbye Bird. I lived in Austin when you rolled out your terrible service there and I won't miss you at all.

pasttense01• 3 years ago

Which competitors in this business are making significant profits?

KyleBerezin• 3 years ago

Sometimes, the candle that burns brightest is actually just a dumpster that is on fire.

adhesive_wombat• 3 years ago

It's wild to me how these things get these valuations. It's just a scooter and an app. There's demonstrably barely any technical moat here. The only possible way to stay afloat at that kind of value long term is if your scooters are somehow substantially better and your competitors can't ever catch up, you managed to freeze out everyone else though aggressive lobbying, or you manage to somehow be the only socially acceptable option to some group of fashion victims who care what colour paint their tech company uses.

Plus you've weighed yourself down with thousands of just about the fastest-depreciating device you can physically make.

slibhb• 3 years ago

The birds in my area are falling apart so I'm not shocked to hear the company is doing poorly. I'll be sad if renting scooters is no longer an option.

If I was designing a city, I'd ban cars except for a few prominent roads and make rentable electric vehicles the norm. You'd gain a ton of real estate by not needing parking spaces/garages. Plus cars are a slow way to get around cities due to traffic and lights/stop signs every block.

ilrwbwrkhv• 3 years ago

Did the founder and initial investors make money? This article says they didn't but usually that is the only real goal and rest is all a story sold to the next dummy. He does have properties in the 20 millions in Miami though.

https://news.crunchbase.com/real-estate-property-tech/bird-f...

kangaroozach2• 3 years ago

Any word on this? How much did they cash out before it hit the pavement?

kangaroozach2• 3 years ago

This was inevitability was obivous to me when I realized that

A) It cost like $5-$10 to go just a short distance.

B) Any regular commuter could just buy their own scooter for basically the cost of a bicycle.

The economics just didn’t make sense.

Bird, once valued at $2.5B, just filed for bankruptcy

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